The Friday livestream brought a lot of hope

Ive started to get an eye on Air baloons.

Can we just assume there are really strong winds ATM and double clicking on a baloon on someones lot will send you to a random town?

 

@Vladamir Begemot Was there any discussion on opening up row lots, so they can be set as empty?

 

Not that I recall, but I missed a bunch of the second half. I think I would have heard it during the news. But I'll make random guess and say they make it this month.

 

Thanks Vlad! Fingers crossed.

 

I agree with you that RNG sux, but its like a bullet in the brain at this point. If you try to get it out, it'll kill ya, so ya leave it in there and sort of deal with it. Thats what we are doing here, living with a random number bullet in our crafting systems brain.
Best if we stop wailing about the wound and start figuring out how to talk again.

 

As a POT owner, this is actually something that I don't want.

 

Be nice if they gave us POT owners the option to change the row lot house style if we don't have it empty. I am okay with being able to set it as empty if someone wants. I know we POT owners have a style we want to keep, but we also want people living in our towns; so a compromise needs to take place as to what a player wants vs town style.

 

An option to prevent certain lots from being empty would be really good.

 

So, I just managed to watch/listen to the stream, finally managed to get some time and it was really, really, good. The guys were all in great spirits! Some of the cool things (in no particular order):

• Pirate Hat drop from the skeleton in Tartarus apparently makes you talk like a pirate! This is insanely cool.
• There is a secret passage in Tartarus and @Lord British mentioned maybe putting a painting on the other side of the corridor as a clue as it's a very long corridor. Awesome to see little moments of game design like this. Someone (can't remember which dev, sorry!) mentioned a pointing skeleton as another cool way to hint at secrets.
• A sneak peak of Ulfheim and some of the design principles behind it, awesome lore related stuff and mention of Episode II!
• Mannequins! Mannequins are coming very soon! Finally a nice way to display my release hats and some of the rarer armours.
• Wooden staves are also in the works. I'm not a massive fan of the skull one so this'll be a lovely little addition. Apparently it's been on the backlog for aaages.
• @Chris's Death Metal Slime and the reason for the name, brilliant!
• The order of how stuff gets worked on. It was awesome to see @DarkStarr talking about how sometimes we don't see the order of things being worked on maybe aligned to our own priorities but that they do ultimately get to it. (Personally, it's been my experience that a great many things I've mentioned in the forums have actually ended up in the game! And that's such an awesome experience to be a part of, truly.)
• The flaming bagpipes explained! I had no idea about Unicycle Vader, dude is hilarious!
• "Richard in a Box" - SNL inspiration I also never knew about, such a funny sketch, will be sending around a link at work heh.
• Fixing the Map! YESSS! @Alleine Dragonfyre
• Armour dyeing! Hopefully it doesn't go too garish but it'll be a very nice touch, especially for crafters.

Feeling really buzzed about SotA right now!

 

LoL. Not a chance ^^

 

... was there more, that wasn't mentioned? How about the quest/UI rework? Reworking combat mechanics? Reworking player/leveling balance? Reworking crafting? Improving PVP?

We're getting a scene decloned, another staff pattern, finishing making wearables dyable after all these years, and to finish making the map not-borked? I guess we need to start somewhere, but I'm not about to be calling for more cities to be opened up for floods of new players.

Oh, and a hat that makes you talk like a pirate.

 

He quoted what he personally liked.

That's talked about in the stream for example.
You will not like it though *shrugs*.

 

Yeah, quest/journal/dialogue box stuff is indeed very close to my heart so I tend to fight those particular battles. I'll positively be shouting from the rooftops when I see a stream about that!

As @Earl Atogrim von Draken pointed out, it was just stuff that I found cool personally. A huge segment of the stream was about the crafting elephant in the room.

Re; combat mechanics and player/leveling balance and PvP, well I've not really had a problem there but I don't do a lot of it tbh. Chris seems to do quite a bit on that though, doesn't he? I can appreciate how it's important to a lot of peeps though, don't get me wrong.

I'm not high-level enough at crafting yet so I just tend to my tailoring and furniture shops at the moment. I've dabbled a bit with MC and Ench. but I haven't gotten to the point yet where RNG is killing me. I remember Elite: Dangerous got quite a bit of backlash about crafting RNG back in the day and I think eventually they nixed it. In any case, there's heaps of other threads and opinions about it and I am in no way qualified to weigh in on the subject. For what it's worth, I did like the original plan, I really like the idea of specialization and grand-master bonuses but apparently the market would be destroyed by the 'napkin plan' for reasons I completely don't understand.

 

The problem with crafting isn't the RNG.

It's a cocktail of:
- virtual permanence of items
- supremacy of certain stats
- base material costs

The combination results in 90% of items being worthless and the 10% of good items unable to recoup enough sunk cost to make it profitable overall.

When you remove RNG either explicitly or with rerolls, you fix the 90/10 part but you make the "virtual permanence of items" part so much worse.

One step forward, two steps back.

 

Some people contextualize the RNG as making the game challenging. But it's not "hard". It's "maddening". That's the big problem with it... and as you say, it's what's used to try to solve problems that could be solved other ways.

 

RNG is absolutely the problem with Enchanting / Master working.

I want a sword that focuses on a particular effect. Make 3 rolls, don't get the effect I want. Throw the sword away.
Rinse... repeat ad nauseum, until I get the sword I want. That could be 2 tries...that could be 20 tries...that could be 50 tries.

Why waste time and effort banging your head on a wall?


Say I'm a car dealer, and someone comes up to me and asks for a new Red Ford Coupe, with tinted windows and DVD player in the dash. I tell my workers "here's the car the customer wants, build it".

I wait, and eventually, they drive out a Green Chevy Sedan with tinted windows.

"What's this? I didn't want this."

"It's a car. You wanted a car. Here's a car."

"No, I wanted a Red Ford Coupe, with tinted windows and DVD player in the dash. Now go build it."

"Sure thing. We need to get paid though, and we need more materials to make the car."

Go through the above process 15 more times, with varying incorrect results. You've wasted tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars paying your workers and for materials to MAYBE get the car the customer ordered.

It doesn't make sense. But that's the system we have. Does not make sense at all.

 

So, just so I can get my head around this... Hypothetically... For someone making furniture for example... Instead of incrementally upgrading a chair to a fancypants chair with a clear and guaranteed outcome, I'd potentially have to re-roll a bunch of times, assuming I was a GM carpenter, just to get my specific type of chair?

But.. without RNG, I'd sell it for 2k... Maybe because I spent 1.5k making it. But with RNG, potentially I spent 9k making it? And no one buys a chair for that.

But... that's a chair and doesn't really impact PvP so... Oh.
(Unless you could belt people with chairs, that'd be amazing)

And.... the best gear is player-made so... Ahh.

Elite Dangerous shipped the Engineers update with an RNG slot machine and fans hated it. It was seen as an artificial way to prolong players' playing time. Oh dear.

Is that what's happening here?

I still don't get why Starr's initial solution wouldn't work. Is there a fear all the top-end dudes would dominate the market? Why couldn't someone just undercut them a little and foster some economic competition? Is it because mats are fundamentally too rare/expensive at the top? Is it because finding gear on merchants is too hard?

Or is it simply that prices would be wildly volatile based on crafter luck? (I.e. on the one hand, dude sells sword for 20k, on the other hand, dude loses 40k on a dud piece?)

 

That is EXACTLY what is happening here.

 

... I think we may be on to something.